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[Mr Swordfish]

The wiki says:

You can play your media on the client, and create playlists. But any changes you make on the client are not saved on the server until you select Library Sync... from the Library menu selection.

i.e. I can *create* playlists and save them back to the library by selecting Library Sync.

But can I edit existing playlists remotely?  Sometimes one of my playlists coughs up a furball and it would be nice to be able to yeet the offending track right then and there.  I suppose I could try it and see if it works...

[Hendrik]

That should be just fine.

[Mr Swordfish]

I tried it and it seems to work. 

I'm a little confused about the "read-only authentication", which presumably gives a connection the ability to listen but not to ability to edit or create playlists.  There doesn't seem to be a way to turn that on with a different set of credentials.  Not that I have plans to use that feature.

Actually, I'm pretty baffled by the whole authentication scheme for Media Server.  I tried changing the password for authentication but the client machine connects without ever prompting me for the new password.  So, I'm not sure which password is the correct one (I didn't write down the old one and don't remember it, but the client MC remembers it).  Tried restarting MC on the clent machine, and rebooting to see if I could make it prompt for the new password, but it just connects without asking for the password.


When I go to Tools -> Options -> Media Network and click the Authentication checkbox, it asks for a password. I assumed that this was how the password was set for the client, but perhaps not?

Remote access is working, I just don't understand *how* it's working.

[Mr Swordfish]

BTW, I thought not requiring a password might be due to connecting via the LAN, but I just tried connecting via my phone's wifi hotspot and it still doesn't ask for a password.  Not sure what's going on... 

[Mr Swordfish]

Any thoughts on the above? In particular how to grant read-only access to some clients while retaining the ability to modify playlists on other clients.

[Hendrik]

It should be as simple as making a choice for read-only access

- Enable Authentication and set user/pass for read-write access
- Set Read-Only authentication to whichever mode you like, user/pass or everyone
- Set Read-Only credentials if you picked user/pass above

Note that clients can store an authentication token after being logged in, so that credential changes might not impact it immediately.

[Mr Swordfish]

Well, it should be that simple, but it's not at all clear from the UI how to do that.

And now my client machine won't connect - it worked for about a week and then the client machine rebooted due to a windows update and now I can't get it to connect at all.

The error message is "There was a problem connecting to the library.  Please ensure that your network connection is available and that the server is running properly."

I've verified both, and it still throws the same error.  It never prompts for a password.  I'm a four hour drive from the server now.   Access code is SVOHmO. 

Any ideas?

[Mr Swordfish]

UPDATE:  If I  use a different laptop (one without JRiver installed) and go to the JRiver panel at http://my-ip:52199/Panel/
it prompts me for a name and password, and if I enter it correctly I get in and can browse the files etc.

But the laptop that has JRiver installed won't connect; my hunch is that the password isn't being accepted since I changed it about a week ago, but I haven't figured out a way to get it to ask for a name/password to log in with the new password.

This seems like a bug - if the name/password is the failure, it should prompt for a new entry, not just try the old one over and over again.

UPDATE 2: Using the same laptop that has JRiver installed, I can also go to the panel website, enter the name/password and browse everyting.

So, the problem appears to be that MC is using the wrong password and I can't figure out a way to get it to use the correct one- if I create a new library with the same access code it still doesn't prompt me for a name and password.

I tried deleting the old library and creating a new one, but since the Access Code is the same it appears to be trying the same name/password instead of prompting for a new one.

[mwillems]

So I've had a persistent issue where when I enable both read-only and read-write authentication clients get "stuck" on one or the other because I can't get the client to let me change or remove it's credentials associated with a server, and that sounds similar to the issue you're seeing.  The only way I could solve it was to turn off read-only authentication entirely and change the read-write credentials. Then my clients reprompted me to give them the read-write credentials and I could change them.  May be worth a try in your case?

I agree it would be much nicer if library manager had a button that would let you a) change the credentials for any given server and b) would let you choose whether to try and connect read-only or read-write to the server.  As it is if you enable both read-only and read-write there's no way to pick or switch for any given client.

[Mr Swordfish]

Thanks. But the server is a four hour drive away, I won't be there for another ten days, and I'd really like to get Media Server working again.  I can't fiddle with the server configuration from here.

Maybe there's some registry entry I could edit to make MC forget the old login credentials?  Or perhaps re-install MC, which seems like overkill to just fix a password issue.

I can wait on figuring out how to grant read-only access to some users and retain write access for other logins.  Sounds to me that doing this is buggy.